The term “mennonite” comes from the name of the founding father Menno Simons, but the movement actually began a few years before Menno got on board and made his mark. In the early-1500s there was a wee bit of discontent within the reigning church, and a man named Martin Luther wrote a list of 95 issues he had with Catholicism and nailed them to the door of All Saints Church, thus effectively kick-starting a little period in the history of Christianity called the Reformation. Like a crack in a windshield, once weakened thus shattered: the church split, then the splitters split, and while Protestants and Lutherans went their way, another group of free-thinking Germans in central Europe went a little further. In 1525, a group of fifteen men held an illegal meeting around the kitchen table of one of the party, and made a decision that marked the beginning of the Anabaptist movement and ultimately the Radical Reformation.
The decision? They baptized each other. They believed that church membership should not be determined for a child at birth as was mandated by the catholic church, but should be a reasoned and well-thought-out choice made by an informed adult when willing to publicly acknowledge belief in Jesus and the desire to live in accordance with his teachings.
CHOICE. That’s the rock in the windshield for Mennonites – the fundamental belief that an individual’s participation in the church (which was a considerably all-encompassing power in the average life in the 1500s) should not be made on one’s behalf at birth, but should only come as the result of learning, discussion, soul-searching, and life-long commitment.
If you stop right here and never learn another thing about Mennonites from this blog or elsewhere, know this: people were persecuted, arrested, imprisoned, and even killed because they fervently believed in the importance of making the choice and commitment to the kind life they would lead and the kind of person they would be. In their case, in a very broad sense, that meant following the ministry of Jesus: who, regardless of whether or not you consider him the son of god, is widely agreed to have been a strong leader, a kind teacher, and a symbol of love and compassion.
In choosing someone to emulate, they could do worse.
But I digress. The specifics are not what matters. The radical take-away here is that every person should make a choice, should have the freedom to make that choice, about who they are going to be and how they are going to live their life. I don’t mean the “what are you going to be when you grow up” choice, but rather “what kind of person?” What do you stand for? What are you remembered for?
The advice that could come next is a whole nother can of worms, but a band of brothers from North Carolina pretty much nails it with a lyric from their song Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise that is sung like a punch in the gut to someone waffling in indecision. And so for now I’ll leave it at that:
“decide what to be, and go be it” – the avett brothers